EDWARD SHILS WAS A PROLIFIC, FORMIDABLE AND unconventional sociologist. Sustained by his immense learning and extraordinary memory, and following the traditions of Max Weber and of the Chicago School, he brought other disciplines (notably European social and political thought) to bear upon his sociology. Over his long and productive lifetime he held positions in the most distinguished of universities: in England these included the LSE, Manchester and Peterhouse, Cambridge. He regularly spent about half of every year in Cambridge. Above all he was a loyal and long-serving teacher at the University of Chicago where he was distinguished service professor and had been among those who established the Committee of Social Thought. His scholarship was recognized in the USA by the invitation of the US National Council on the Humanities to give the prestigious Jefferson Lecture in 1979 and in Europe by the award of the Balzan Prize for service to general sociology in 1983. Government and Opposition has itself lost a most valued contributor and member of its Advisory Board.

LIKE MANY PEOPLE, I FIND KARL POPPER BOTH FASCINATING and irritating. His vigour and lucidity are irresistible, and no one could complain that he fails to engage with the big questions. The problems begin when we consider his political thought. Some think him one of the great liberal philosophers of the century. I on the other hand, while being fascinated by The Open Society and its Enemies, am repelled by the grossness of its caricaturing of most of the thinkers it touches. The Poverty of Historicism is a marvellous text in the philosophy of the social sciences, but the idea of historicism is a straw man. The paradox seems to be that while there is a lot that refers to the political questions of the day, there is virtually nothing which takes up issues of political philosophy directly. The result is that he seems to me always to be on the wrong foot, and my problem is to discover why.

THE EARLY GENERAL ELECTIONS IN SLOVAKIA HELD ON 30 September–1 October 1994 and resulting in the victory of populists and nationalists caught many observers by surprise, both in and outside Slovakia. Unlike in Poland and Hungary, the leftist party in Slovakia suffered decisive setbacks, receiving 10.4 per cent of the poll instead of around 20 per cent as indicated in the pre-election surveys. The Democratic Party, the latest successors to the intellectuals who took power from the communists after November 1989, did not even receive the 5 per cent necessary to enter the National Council (see Table 1). The reaction to the overall results has been one of resignation, and pessimism about the fate of democracy in this post-communist country, which, with the Czech Republic constituted Czechoslovakia until 1993.